Lebanese Government Determined to Disarm Hezbollah by Year’s End

The Trump Administration has for months been pressuring the Lebanese government to demand that Hezbollah disarm. At a meeting of the Cabinet in Beirut this past week, called by President Joseph Aoun, it was clear that Hezbollah, so greatly weakened by the IDF, no longer intimidates the Lebanese — Sunnis, Christians and many Shi’a too — who want Hezbollah to give up its weapons and become a purely political movement.

More on that meeting, and the walkout by all the Shiite members of the cabinet, can be found here: “Cabinet adopts ‘objectives’ laid out in US proposal for Hezbollah disarmament,” L’Orient Today, August 7, 2025:

Just half an hour after all Shiite ministers walked out of a Cabinet meeting on the state’s attempts to achieve a monopoly on arms, which specifically centers around Hezbollah’s disarmament, the government announced on Thursday that it had approved the “objectives set out” by a U.S. proposal on how to do so.

The proposal, often described as a “roadmap” was presented to Lebanon by U.S. envoy Tom Barrack in June, amid increasing domestic and international pressure on the Lebanese government to speed up the process of establishing an arms monopoly, on which sorely needed foreign financial support has been conditioned.

President Joseph Aoun has led discussions with Hezbollah, insisting on a dialogue-based approach that doesn’t exacerbate existing tensions amid a shifting political landscape. However, Hezbollah, for its part, insists it will not disarm so long as Israel continues it aggression against the country and its occupation of land in southern Lebanon.

Upon leaving the Cabinet meeting, Information Minister Paul Morcos read out the objectives Cabinet had adopted from the U.S. proposal:

1 : Lebanon commits to implementing the Taif Agreement, as well as the Lebanese Constitution and U.N. Security Council resolutions, in particular Resolution 1701 (2006), and to taking necessary measures to extend its full sovereignty over its entire territory, with the aim of reinforcing the role of legitimate institutions, establishing the state’s monopoly over decisions of war and peace, and ensuring the exclusive possession of arms by the state throughout Lebanese territory.

2 : Ensure the durability of the cease-fire, including the end of all violations on land, air, and sea, through organized steps leading to a sustainable, comprehensive, and guaranteed solution.

3 : Gradually end the armed presence of all non-state factions, including Hezbollah, throughout Lebanese territory, both south and north of the Litani River, while providing appropriate support to the Lebanese Army and Internal Security Forces.

The Aoun government believes Hezbollah has been sufficiently weakened by Israel, and the Lebanese National Army been sufficiently strengthened with recent shipments of American military aid, for the latter to be in a position to challenge the former — something that just a year ago could not even be imagined.

Since October 8, 2023, the IDF has been striking Hezbollah targets all over Lebanon, and not just in its stronghold of Dahiyeh in southern Beirut. The Bekaa Valley and Hezbollah-occupied buildings in central Beirut have also been hit. The IDF has managed to destroy between 80% and 90% of Hezbollah’s vast storehouse of some 150,000 missiles and rockets. The presence of Hezbollah does not protect Lebanon from IDF attacks, but makes them more likely. And though the Israelis aim to hit only Hezbollah targets, inevitably some innocent civilians will also be killed. So the Lebanese now think the time is right to demand that Hezbollah disarm, with Hezbollah weakened by having thousands of its combatants killed, and 4,000 of them severely wounded by the “exploding pagers,” and its store of major weaponry reduced by 80-90%. Furthermore, Hezbollah has now lost its only supplier of weapons, Iran, which can no longer send weapons to the terror group via Syria, which is now in the hands of Sunnis who hate the Iranian Shi’a and prevent any Iranian weapons shipments from reach Hezbollah.

This is big news. For the first time, a Lebanese government has been resolute in its demand that Hezbollah must disarm. It knows how weak militarily Hezbollah has become, with so much of its weaponry destroyed by the IDF and with no possibility of being resupplied by Iran, and how much stronger the Lebanese National Army (LNA) has become with several hundred million dollars’ worth of American military aid. It is no longer unthinkable that the LNA would take on Hezbollah fighters to disarm them — not in the terror group’s stronghold in southern Beirut, but in the Bekaa Valley and, especially, in the area south of the Litani River, from which Hezbollah is obligated to withdraw completely according to UN SC Resolution 1701, but has not been doing so.

What Lebanon needs right now is a dramatic increase in American military aid, to keep the Lebanese Army well-supplied and able to challenge Hezbollah units, first in outlying areas, and then, by degrees, establishing a cordon sanitaire around the Shi’a neighborhoods in southern Beirut, keeping Hezbollah combatants bottled up, unable to launch missiles at Israel that only invites retaliation by the IDF that is not always limited to targeting Hezbollah areas.